Friday

Aug 30, 2019 at 2:30 PM

In Henrik Ibsen’s canonical drama “Hedda Gabler,” the walls are closing in on the title character. Some walls are of Hedda’s making; others were erected long before she arrived on the scene. Walls of politeness and patriarchy, walls of silence and social norms.

Columbia’s GreenHouse Theatre Project typically moves over and around walls — sometimes it even works without them. As the always-innovating, site-specific company moves into its first “proper” venue to stage “Hedda Gabler” — the Missouri Theatre, with its stately walls and ornate fixtures — its challenge is to make the play feel as claustrophobic as Ibsen intended, and as intimate as its own track record demands.

The show originates in the reserved society of Ibsen’s 19th-century Norway, with its polite fictions and patres familias. GreenHouse will stage the show in a contemporary setting, and its principal artists felt little dissonance as they sought resonances stretching across time and place.

GreenHouse co-founder Elizabeth Braaten Palmieri, who will play Hedda, saw a certain resemblance between Ibsen’s characters — cultural pillars trying to make their marriages and careers work — and people she knows and loves.

“This is my community,” she said. “... It’s people in their mid-30s to mid-40s, with their careers and their relationships and everything — the floor is starting to crack underneath them. Things become less and less stable and concrete day-to-day, and you start questioning the choices you’ve made in life.”

Ibsen’s Norwegian sensibilities also ring true to Palmieri and guest artists Matt Trucano and Julia Valen. All attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and internalized a sort of Upper Midwestern countenance and way of behaving. Ibsen’s characters are “screaming on the inside, but unable to express that on the outside,” Palmieri said.

“There’s this pressure to look like something, to be a certain way, to keep up a very pious, humble way of life,” added Trucano, who is directing the show.

Palmieri folded Trucano and Valen, who plays Thea, into the company in part because of their school ties. She also welcomed the infusion of new life and theatrical experience they brought with them. Trucano’s presence allowed Palmieri to step onto the stage and embody Hedda.

“This is not a piece I could just have anyone direct ... If I had not found the right director for this, I would have foregone playing Hedda and would have directed it,” she said.

Superficially, Ibsen’s characters appear very staid and polite, Trucano said. But he sees a group of people who are “hyper-alive” and trying to break free. That feeling is relevant in any age, especially for women who often face the pressure of unrealistic or unhealthy social expectations.

“Every beat of Ibsen’s play exists, which is a testament to the greatness of this text,” he said. “That it really speaks to us.”

Palmieri, Trucano and Valen discussed whether “Hedda Gabler,” sometimes acknowledged for a before-its-time portrayal of women as complex, three-dimensional figures, was a work of feminism. The answer they settled on? Yes and no.

Ibsen himself was clear that he wasn’t making feminist theater, Valen said. Rather, he was considering the question “How are we getting along?” Trucano noted. In examining social cohesion, or lack thereof, Ibsen had to inspect the roots of poison fruit, which ultimately indicted a blindly patriarchal construct. Several sets of male-female characters mirror each other, Valen said, introducing the radical idea that people face similar problems across gender lines.

Contemporary artists face pressure, Palmieri said, to resist oppression by staging work that is uplifting and overtly feminist. But displaying harsh realities drives home what oppression looks and feels like, and makes audiences confront pictures they might otherwise squirm away from. If “Hedda Gabler” fleshes out what it means to have your agency stripped away, “then it might be a feminist piece after all,” Trucano said.

For GreenHouse, accustomed to performing in galleries, stores, coffee shops and living rooms, the spacious Missouri Theatre presents its own set of challenges — and opportunities. In characteristic fashion, Palmieri said the company won’t use the theater in a conventional way, but will rather seize the chance to shrink and reorient the space, inviting the audience directly into the work. The theater, as with all GreenHouse shows, will become a character with its own part to play in the show’s mood and mode of communication.

GreenHouse isn’t known for being old-fashioned, but Trucano sees a way in which “Hedda Gabler” hearkens back to a sort of theatrical experience often lost in our overly ironic age. The show, no matter how reserved on the surface, asks its actors to fully buy in and perform with real earnestness. When this happens, audiences will find their pulses slowing, their attentions aroused and their ability to see the thread connecting Ibsen’s Norway to the 21st-century Midwest expanded.

“There’s two words for time in Greek, and one of them is kronos — and that’s like clock time. And there’s kairos, which is felt time,” Trucano said. “And it seems to me, watching these actors, I’m only living in kairos.”

adanielsen@columbiatribune.com 573-815-1731

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